Would Someone Please Wake Up Senator Tom Cotton?

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Holy Dixieland, wailed Senator Tom Cotton, hiring more black folks means fewer jobs for us white people!

Senator Tom Cotton, a far-out right-winger, is to good public policy what a boll weevil is to a good cotton crop: totally destructive.

But he is politically candid: Rather than disguising his racial bigotry, for example, Tom flaunts it, as he did last month in an open letter to the retail giant, Target. While the senator is usually a devoted corporate-hugging Republican, he lashed out at Target for business policies that he furiously condemns as racially discriminatory… against white people!

What popped Tom’s cork was the chain’s pledge to increase the number of Black people it hires by 20%. Holy Dixieland, wailed Cotton, hiring more of them means fewer jobs for us white people! He insisted that Caucasians have the right to take any and all of Target’s jobs.

Interestingly, Target’s gesture to racial equality was made three years ago, with no peep or protest from the now-infuriated Cotton. What changed? The GOP’s dog-whistling tune. The new politically correct line of anti-Black racists (even parroted by today’s Republican Supreme Court) is that all efforts to provide racial fairness and balance are — get this — illegal racism against the white majority!

So, Cotton is just scurrying aboard his party’s latest anti-Black bandwagon, proclaiming that whites must be protected from racial progress. Not only are Tom and his ilk threatening teachers, librarians and local governments for promoting equality, but also brand-name corporations that they claim to be “woke” — that is, not solely focused on profits, but also promoting a little attention to America’s need for social justice.

Ironically, Tom’s clique piously claims to be devout Christians. But guess who was supremely woke? Jesus! Tom Cotton needs to review the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus declared that those who hunger and thirst for justice are blessed.

Texas, What the Hell: A Murderous Governor

Little-known fact: A leading cause of death in Texas is Gov. Greg Abbott.

Yes, by intentional actions and deliberate inactions, Abbott has used his gubernatorial policies to kill thousands of Texans, including: his calculated refusal to extend Medicaid to millions of poor Texans (including nearly a million children); his intentional denial of water breaks for outdoor workers broiling under this year’s 100-plus-degree heat dome; his lethal deregulation of utilities causing the state power grid to collapse for days in the deep freeze of 2021 with hundreds dying for lack of heat and water; his shameful prioritizing of gun extremism over the lives of schoolchildren; and his despicable, grandstanding stunts at the Mexican border, killing untold hundreds of migrant families by design.

These people are not dying accidentally, but are victims of Abbot’s premeditated policies and political ambition. Consider his silly scheme of throwing $9.5 BILLION of Texas taxpayers’ money into the ditch of his highly ballyhooed border-security PR show. Grandiosely branded “Operation Lone Star,” it has posed Generalissimo Abbott as a right-wing border hero.

Some hero. He has stretched miles of razor wire underwater in the Rio Grande, slashing the flesh of migrant families and trapping babies and pregnant women in the coils. And Abbott’s state troopers have been commanded to shove exhausted and injured refugees back into the river toward Mexico. As one appalled trooper says: “We have stepped over a line into the inhumane.”

This willful cruelty is immoral, but it’s made ridiculous by the fact that Abbott’s militaristic power play has totally failed to deter migration. After all, these families are fleeing for their lives and future, so he can wrap all of Texas in razor wire, and they will still come… and find a way in.

Abbott can kill lots of them, but he can’t kill the human spirit.

Jim Hightower
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